Episode 607: Eddie Muller, Warren Zanes, S. A. Cosby

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• TCM's Eddie Muller offers up a noir nightcap

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  When Eddie Muller — known as the ‘Czar of Noir’ — was launching his popular “Noir Alley” series with Turner Classic Movies, he told TCM that his approach to discussing films has always been “more Barroom, not Classroom.”

  “In my cinematic education, I certainly ran into a lot of people who wanted to tell you that they knew exactly what was right and wrong with every movie ever made and everything was over intellectualized,” Muller tells Wisconsin Public Radio’s “BETA.”

  “So, I felt, I’m going to be the very knowledgeable enthusiast because I see my job as getting people to watch and enjoy these movies and perhaps providing a little extra context to enrich the experience,” he continues. “But my goal is not to convince them of how much I know about this stuff or that there’s a right or wrong way to look at or enjoy films.”

  Now, the Czar is bringing that barroom banter to readers with his book, “Eddie Muller’s Noir Bar: Cocktails Inspired by the World of Film Noir” where you can pair up a libation to your favorite noir from “The Maltese Falcon” to “Sunset Boulevard.”

  Much like the world of noir, Muller has some authority behind the stick. He briefly bartended to make ends meet while starting out and jokes that he has the credentials to prove it.

  “I was a bartender in San Francisco, a proud graduate of the Golden Gate Bartending School,” Muller recalls. “Believe it or not, I guess I got suckered into that.”

  Muller writes that his bartending teacher, Mac, required all his GBBS students to “ACE” their final exam. That meant they had to create and pour drinks for Mac and his wife and Mac’s handpicked friends with “attitude, conviviality, and efficiency.”

  Muller has poured that lifelong love of the cocktail scene into “Noir Bar” where in addition to offering up cocktail pairings and creations to 50 noir films, he also shares plenty of tips to turn your home bar into the Blue Dahlia nightclub.

  Muller puts his money where his mouth is. During the COVID quarantine presentations of “Noir Alley,” viewers got a glimpse of Muller’s actual home tiki bar when he shot all his introductions from it. That wasn’t a set.

  “I have a cocktail lounge, a separate cocktail lounge that I built in my old 1912 garage in back of my house. So, this is something I do all the time,” he said.

  In fact, Muller states that “Noir Bar” came together in those down times during COVID where he — like much of the world — was enjoying home happy hours a little more frequently.

  “It’s truly kind of an outgrowth of the whole pandemic. You know, cocktail hour became very important for people during the pandemic,” Muller said. “The idea of putting it all together in book form really did grow out of COVID and just the fun of being able to have time to experiment with things.”

  Muller jokes that writing this book did have some fun side effects too.

  “I got to say, when you do a cocktail book, there’s a huge advantage in that you get to write all that booze off your taxes as research. So that was pretty useful as well,” he said.

  Actor Robert Mitchum — who critic Roger Ebert called “the soul of Noir” — is featured a few times in “Noir Bar” and one of Muller’s favorite drink/film combo comes from the 1953 film, “Angel Face” which also happens to be a cocktail.

  “The Angel Face is an original. It was originally created during Prohibition at the Detroit Athletic Club,” Muller said. “So, I adopt that cocktail as the one for that film.”

  In that entry, Muller also shares the legendary story — shared to him by co-star Jean Simmons — of how “Angel Face” director Otto Preminger made Simmons’ experience working on the film “torture.”

  “At one point, Otto insisted on repeated takes of Mitchum slapping her face, demanding harder hits each time,” Muller writes in “Noir Bar.” “Finally, Mitchum smacked Preminger across the kisser, asking, ‘You mean like that, Otto?’”

  These anecdotes and bits of film trivia were important to Muller because what’s a good bartender without good stories.

  “I mean, making the drink is one thing, but being able to tell you a funny story about the drink or where the drink comes from or where they first discovered the drink, that’s equally important,” Muller said.

  It also makes it so that “Noir Bar” doesn’t exclude any teetotalers.

  “I also wanted to write a book that if you don’t drink, it’s still worth having the book and reading the book, even if you’re not going to make the cocktails. That was an important part of the approach for me,” said Muller.

  Muller also uses these entries to offer up his reasoning for certain pairings, a few of which may surprise some people.

  Take the Humphrey Bogart Lauren Bacall 1946 film, “The Big Sleep” where even though the film features an opening conversation about mixing Brandy with Champagne that would seem like a no-brainer pairing for this film, Eddie mixes it up a bit.

  “I definitely wanted to include (‘The Big Sleep’), not just for Bogie and Bacall, but because of Raymond Chandler and how important he is to the genre. Because I like my noir on the page as well as the screen,” he said.

  So, instead of a Brandy drink, Muller went with Chandler’s drink of choice.

  “I chose to pair it with a gimlet, which Chandler fans know is the drink that he sort of immortalized in a later novel, ‘The Long Goodbye,’ where he mentions it, I think, 23 times,” Muller said.

  One of the cocktails that best demonstrates Eddie’s process behind his mixology comes from 1959’s “Odds Against Tomorrow” starring and produced by Civil Rights icon, Harry Belafonte, about an indebted Black jazz player and a racist Southern tough having to work together on the film’s central heist.

  “The whole idea of making cocktails is putting together ingredients that you might be surprised can work in balance,” said Muller. “That entire film is about how these cohorts cannot work in balance and that their racial issues sink them in the end.”

  “So, I wanted to make a cocktail that sort of went against that grain,” he continued. “So, I created what I call a ‘Johnny and Earl,’ which are the names of the two characters. And the Johnny is a Jamaican black rum representing Harry Belafonte’s Jamaican roots and Southern Comfort for the Earl Slater character that Robert Ryan plays, and then it needed a little something extra — allspice dram — to kind of smooth things out.”

  So what movie makes Eddie want to raise a glass? He said that even though all the “Thin Man” movies entice him to pour a few fingers, it’s Burt Lancaster’s booth and Martini from 1957’s “Sweet Smell of Success” that represents paradise to Eddie.

  “If you’ve seen that, you know that’s like my idea of heaven is J.J. Hunsecker’s booth at 21 Club where he just presides there and has platters of oysters delivered with his martinis,” Muller said.

  “Noir Bar” is available now from Running Press.

• Bruce Springsteen's 'Nebraska': The album that brought fans 12 feet closer

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  Warren Zanes was a member of the 1980s band The Del Fuegos and has shared the stage with Bruce Springsteen. He is also the New York Times bestselling author of a biography of the late Tom Petty.

  

  Zanes’ new book is “Deliver Me From Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska.” He writes beautifully about this 1982 album, which features ten dark story songs that Springsteen recorded by himself with no plans to release the songs as an album. While researching the book, Zanes talked to Springsteen and many other musicians, including Rosanne Cash and former “BETA” guest Steven Van Zandt.

  Wisconsin Public Radio’s “BETA” sat down with Zanes to find out what motivated him to devote an entire book to the making of a single album. It turns out that Zanes had some questions.

  “Why would an artist — who, after making his fifth album, (‘The River‘) which went to No. 1 and contained his first top 10 single, (‘Hungry Heart‘) — make a record like ‘Nebraska,’ which couldn’t even be played on FM radio alongside the other rock hits of the day?” Zanes asks. “This was such a dramatic — from a marketplace perspective — such a dramatic misstep. Why would someone do it? That was the question that really propelled me.”

  The creation of “Nebraska” was an accident, really. While living in a rental house in New Jersey, Springsteen bought a consumer four-track cassette recorder and recorded demos in the bedroom to save a few bucks on studio time. Because he had no pressure to perform and worry about studio expenses, Springsteen could concentrate solely on the music.

  “What he was hearing after the fact was the sound of an artist deep in his freedom of expression,” says Zanes. “These songs are like short stories. Flannery O’Connor was one of his big influences, and his way of describing what happened when he went into the studio to rerecord this with the E Street band was he said, ‘I lost my characters.’ So, no characters, no stories, no stories, no ‘Nebraska.’”

  Recording without the band allowed the songs to come across in a profoundly intimate way.

  “The singing could get closer to talking,” Zanes observes, “and when the singer gets into a talking style, it pulls the listener 12 feet closer. It means the singer can get close, and you hear the breath more, and the effect is different. I think, clearly, for these songs, Springsteen was going, ‘That’s how it’s got to be done.’”

  So, the demos became the album. In Springsteen’s mind, there was no way to recreate those recordings’ energy and honesty any other way. Springsteen was going through a time of self-examination, and the honesty, desperation, and passion in his voice contributed to the album’s appeal.

  “Springsteen knew this and had been practicing it well before ‘Nebraska,’” Zanes explains. “But being that kind of honest artist when he was going through this kind of personal crisis and making a record in the midst of it was brutally honest.”

  In addition to songs about his personal issues, Springsteen was also concerned with addressing ordinary people’s frustrations in the early 1980s.

  “Reagan’s campaign was ‘Morning in America,’” says Zanes. “It was a full-color America, a very white America, a very middle-class America. It represented life in this country that left many people out. The people left out of Reagan’s image of this country were the ones Springsteen had already been writing about. So, it put him in a position of, ‘If that America is missing, it’s my role as a songwriter to expose that place and those people.’ And he did it.”

  After the release of “Nebraska,” Springsteen and a friend took a road to Springsteen’s new home in the Hollywood Hills. Along the way, the stress of the childhood experiences he had walled himself off from caught up to him, causing an emotional crisis.

  “He was driving from New Jersey to Los Angeles on a circuitous path with his friend Matt to move into the first home that he’d ever purchased for himself. And he has this depressive event,” Zanes explains. “I think there’s a connection between ‘Nebraska’ and that breakdown. I think he went into something that just was destabilizing, ultimately productively destabilizing. He goes into therapy after that, and he gets help.”

  So, why did Bruce Springsteen make the album “Nebraska”? It would seem Springsteen had little choice in the matter.

  He realized and trusted that the songs came from deep within himself and needed a place in the world. The process was painful but ultimately led to growth for Springsteen and a brilliant record for all to hear.

  Zanes thinks the legacy of “Nebraska” is a lesson for people who make music which is to know when to let go.

  “I think it’s that message to songwriters and the people who make recordings that sometimes you break it down to its most essential elements,” Zanes says. “Stop putting things on top of it, stop trying to make it better, release it before you feel comfortable with it, and it might be the virtue it most needs.”

• Author S.A. Cosby focuses on religion in his latest crime novel, 'All the Sinners Bleed'

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  S.A. Cosby is one of the most distinctive crime fiction writers working today. His second novel, “Blacktop Wasteland,” won numerous awards and rave reviews. His third novel, “Razorblade Tears,” was a New York Times’ bestseller and recommended on Barack Obama’s 2022 Summer Reading List.

  Cosby returns to the South for his novel, “All the Sinners Bleed,” and it could well be his finest work yet.

  Cosby told Wisconsin Public Radio’s “BETA” that he considers his latest book to be “a more nuanced examination of small town life in relation to religion, race and class.”

  The protagonist in “All the Sinners Bleed’ is Titus Crown. He’s the first Black Sheriff in a small town in Virginia.

  Cosby thinks Crown is “an interesting character, but I don’t know if we would be friends because we have several different ideas about the way the world works.”

  “But having said that, I believe he is a strong, moral, upright person,” Cosby said. “He’s not perfect and he has his own flaws and faults, but he is someone who, when the darkness arises in his tale, he doesn’t avert his eyes. He stands in the gap between the light in the dark to protect his town, protect the people he loves.”

  Religion isn’t sacrosanct in ‘Sinners’

  Cosby touches on some controversial topics in “Sinners,” including the role of religion, which he said he “played short shrift to” in his earlier books.

  “Religion can be a comfort and it can be a cudgel. It can be used to bring people together, and it can be used to manipulate people and tear them apart,” he said. “And I wanted to embrace and talk about all those aspects. I’m not anti-religious by any stretch of the imagination, but I am attacking hypocrisy. I am anti-manipulation.”

  “So for me, the idea of religion is not bound to any organized hierarchy,” he added. “I think you can be a spiritual person without being a religious person. And, you know, a running river can be spiritual. And so I kind of wanted to explore that through Titus and his own struggle with religion in the book.”

  Cosby also tackles the emotions that follow major traumatic events in the book with a shooting at a local high school. A beloved teacher is killed by a former student who is confronted by Titus and his deputies. In the events that follow, the student is killed, too.

  “What I wanted to do was to show how we have become desensitized to horrific event on top of horrific event. And after the school shooting, Titus and his investigation discovers that the teacher and the student and a third person were involved in a series of terrible crimes.”

  “I wanted to talk about and show how, unfortunately, as a country, we become desensitized; we just move to the next tragedy. We move on to the next horrible event. But characters like Titus don’t forget about that school shooting. They don’t forget about the horrible events. In fact, it weighs on him deeply throughout the rest of the book.”

  King of horror draws tears

  Horror author Stephen King gave “All the Sinners Bleed” a great review in The New York Times. And he wrote that “this is a book filled with carefully controlled anger.”

  How challenging was it for Cosby to control his anger while he was writing “All the Sinners Bleed?”

  “I think what I was angry most about is just the inequality, unfairness of society. I grew up in a small town, and I know how wonderful that can be and I know how claustrophobic that can be. And so I know how you can be judged by your name, not by your individual characteristics.”

  “But also, I know how unfair the law can be. You know, one of Titus’s more naive qualities is he really wants to fix things for the police department. He ran on the basis of trying to make sure that the police department treated everyone more equitably. He has the desire, this belief that if he just treats everyone equal under the law, that he can mete out justice with equanimity. And I believe that’s very difficult because a lot of times justice system in America is inherently unequal. And so it made me really examine my own anger with that.”

  Cosby said that he was very moved by King’s review of “All the Sinners Bleed.”

  “I’m not ashamed to say I cried a little bit because not only is it a review from one of the great American writers of all time, which I don’t think he gets enough credit for that. But it’s also someone I have a very deep personal connection to as a reader. My aunt, when I was a little kid, would give me all her Stephen King novels when she was done reading them. So she gave me these dog-eared paperbacks, and I remember those great paperback covers from the ’70s and ’80s she would give me.”

  What started as ‘Black as Sackcloth’

  After Cosby’s “Razorblade Tears” was released in 2021, he wanted to address police violence in the Black community. So, he started working on a story called “Black as Sackcloth.”

  “Originally ‘Black as Sackcloth’ — which became ‘All the Sinners Bleed’ — was going to be examination of police corruption, police violence and brutality in America, using a small town setting as a microcosm for that,” Cosby said.

  “But I learned rather quickly that I didn’t have enough distance emotionally from that issue to really write about it effectively.”

  He recalls putting a lot of pressure on himself as a result of the incredible response to “Razorblade Tears.”

  “It really changed my life and I really was stacking the bricks on myself to try to replicate that success,” he said.

  After about six months, though, he spoke with fellow writer Eryk Pruitt who told him: ‘Whatever you’re working on doesn’t have to be as good as ‘Razorblade Tears.’ It just has to be good.’”

  “And I think that sort of baseline gave me a new way to appreciate what I was working on. And it really opened up the floodgates for me. And I was able to really dig into the book and find the story I wanted to tell.”